The Tobacco Keeper (36 page)

Who killed Kamal Medhat?

Who killed Kamal Medhat? Why? And how? These were the questions that I kept asking myself. They gave me a splitting headache and made me feel like a robot engaged in a long conversation with itself. At times the conversation was superficial and at others inspiring. When it was neither, it made me sick to my heart. When I was unable to explain anything, I started talking like a parrot whose repetitiveness prompts disgust. Nevertheless, I had to move on, even though it was only moving towards a mysterious void. Speaking about Kamal Medhat was like coloured smears on a white wall or a bell ringing to remind us that we had fallen into a bottomless pit. It was like going on a long journey on a war train full of skulls and screaming black masks. It was like arriving in our country for the first time and finding it overrun by black dread and boundless anarchy.

Kidnapping

It was clear that Kamal had been kidnapped from near the post office in Al-Mansour.

He had gone to the engineers’ office near the post office. The office manager there said that Kamal had stayed for five minutes, and left without drinking his coffee.

The worker standing near the door said that he’d seen hooded men get out of a black minivan holding revolvers with silencers. Another person standing nearby had additional firepower.

Kamal Medhat went inside the post office and straight to the restroom. He left in a hurry and then went through the door next to the service office. From there he moved to a neglected part of the post office, walking through the back corridors and then to a hall at the back.

Did he sense that he was being pursued? Did he get the feeling that nobody would be able to help him?

Did he anticipate who those men were?

What is clear is that the armed gang wreaked havoc in their pursuit of him. A number of explosions destroyed the back area of the post office.

But Kamal Medhat continued walking through the wreckage and climbed to the telephone centre on the second floor. He opened a side door in order to go down the outside staircase. But he turned back as soon as he saw one of the masked men standing by the stairs. So he climbed down an internal staircase and from a back door he ran, with his feet aching, jumping over a garden fence, hoping to escape through an adjacent house. Three shots were fired at him, holding him up.

He reached a four-storey building, went in and headed to the lift. He decided to climb the stairs on foot because the lift was taking too long and he heard cars on the street. The moment he reached the second floor, the masked gang arrived with their guns and raced into the building.

He was on the move through a doctor’s clinic and noticed that the men pursuing him had entered the corridor. But then they vanished, probably having gone upstairs. While he was looking
out of the window of the clinic, he saw the black cars on the street and the masked men carrying weapons.

He opened the door to the next room. He was worried they might attack him from the other end of the corridor. How could he shake them off and escape? He continued through the offices, but instead of going right and facing the masked men, he turned left towards the solitary office at the far end of the room. He wanted a car to help him get away.

He saw them behind him, so he entered another building. The lift was open, so he got in and went up. The lift door opened on the fourth floor. He looked right and found a flight of stairs. He went up. After the hot pursuit, he found himself on an open, flat roof. Looking down, he saw dozens of people had gathered near a rundown restaurant to watch the chase.

Perhaps he thought of jumping off the roof.

He was eighty. Feeling short of breath, he placed his hand on his heart. He tripped over a wire and almost fell. He was still panting and sat down. They led him down and took him to a freshly watered field that was full of wild bushes, leafy plants and some mature trees. They led him across the vast green area and put him in the back of a car, which sped away.

Information

All the information on this period was obtained from Mustafa Shaker. We met him in a faded building near Al-Saadoun Street about a week after our arrival in Baghdad. What was this meeting like?

I went to Al-Saadoun Street, where Faris was waiting for me in a grey, decaying building. This was a real Babel of languages and
dialects, where journalists of all types and from all places co-existed and which they never left. The neighbourhood was completely sealed by concrete walls and guarded at certain points. Inside were laundries, shops and barbers, and bars filled with Americans and Africans. At the entrances of the buildings and on the street corners were soldiers and Filipino workers. Women sat on balconies and clothes were hung on lines that stretched from windowsills and balconies. Faris Hassan’s apartment was smaller than ours in the Green Zone, or so it seemed to me because the tiny living room was filled with clutter, chairs and tables. There was also a bedroom, a kitchen and a bathroom. Though small, the apartment was full of books and CDs. But it wasn’t really claustrophobic because its windows had a view of the street and allowed Baghdad’s vibrant light to enter. There was also a balcony where journalists could place a table and enjoy supper under Baghdad’s stars.

We shook hands with Mustafa Shaker.

He was considered to be the most important journalist in the Middle East. In his long career, he’d written great reports, managed several newspapers and travelled to more than thirty countries. His language was unbelievably eloquent and he was a gifted conversationalist, although he was often forgetful, sometimes even forgetting the names of his friends.

Mustafa Shaker was a short, stout man who was far from elegant. His feet were tiny and his shoes looked like a child’s, being ridiculously small. He had fuzzy grey hair and in the middle of his bald head were a few spiky tufts. Because he slept little, his eyes always looked tired. He worked like a machine and his movements were rapid. His hair was dishevelled and he shaved only once or twice a week, which gave his face the white stubble of an
old man. Whenever he went to clubs, cafés, theatres, cinemas or galleries, as he frequently did, he was either taken for someone who worked there or as a nonentity. It’s impossible to convey how easy writing was for him or his legendary skill in generating ideas and elegant phrases. He was the best journalist I came across in my ‘hoopoe’ job, a description he would often use in reference to journalism and which he borrowed from the story of Prophet Solomon and his hoopoe. Everybody was aware of his talent, but most people ignored him out of jealousy and envy. None of his generation could stand him. As for our generation, we loved him in spite of his many failings, which included his excessive shyness and courtesy, his greed in monopolizing conversations, and his infantile attitude and competitiveness, which often made him coarse or foolish. But all his flaws were forgiven because of his ability to use language so beautifully and elegantly. He had a winning tone and it was great fun to listen to his anecdotes, political memories or journalistic adventures from various places of the world. I was fascinated by this genius with a mischievous personality and spent hours in discussions with him. I realized that he loved devious, evasive talk, a skill I had mastered, so he grew fond of me and whenever we had a business meeting, we’d stay together and chat for a long time.

Mustafa Shaker spent most of his life managing a magazine almost singlehandedly. After the downfall of Saddam’s regime, several newspapers and magazines as well as media institutions had competed for his services, but he wouldn’t accept a permanent position. He moved from one place to another until I saw him at the offices of a new newspaper near Faris’s apartment on Al-Saadoun Street. I was really happy to see him. We embraced and went into his office.

‘How’s the hoopoe work going?’ he asked in reference to my reporting assignments.

Mustafa Shaker talked to me about the general situation in Baghdad. His unusual expressions always amazed me. It was he who provided me with a letter to the forensic physician at the morgue, indicating that the dead man was my father and allowing me to bury him. He also provided us with the name of a person who possessed a complete set of security and intelligence files and who could provide information in return for a fee.

Finding the documents

Mustafa Shaker gave us a letter for the person with the files from the security and intelligence services. His name was Jabbar Hussein and he lived in an apartment in a poor part of Al-Rusafa neighbourhood in Baghdad. The building was very old and stood near a mosque that had been almost completely demolished by an artillery shell. The minaret had fallen to the ground in one piece. We stopped to buy some cigarettes, and the shopkeeper told us that some months earlier, the mosque had been under the control of a group of armed men. There had been a ferocious firefight with the Marines that had destroyed many of the adjacent buildings, houses and shops. Jabbar’s building was dark and tilted to the side. Its façade was destroyed and its staircase had no banisters. Nearby was a spot full of rubbish and dead cats, where rats scurried from one place to another in the darkness.

We arrived at noon. When we entered Jabbar’s room, we were
absolutely dumbfounded. It was a complete archive, catalogued and systematically arranged. Once you gave the name you were looking for, he would search and bring you the papers, all for a price, of course.

We sat in wicker chairs. An old rug covered the yellow-tiled floor. Jabbar was a handsome young man of medium height who spoke with a hint of sarcasm. He sat at a wooden desk stolen from some government office, on top of which was a small Iraqi flag. On the wall behind, instead of the president’s picture, hung a photograph of his father. The caption beneath it read: ‘Photograph of my father. May God preserve and protect him’. Funnily enough, this was the same dedication as the one on Saddam’s photographs. This was just a small office in Baghdad that sold documents. Because of frequent power cuts, the windows and curtains were kept open. On the right he’d placed a lantern on a piece of black vinyl, and on a small low table he’d placed his hookah, filled with aromatic tobacco and from which he inhaled and then slowly blew out the smoke.

We asked him about the file of Kamal Medhat.

He was well organized, and had a list of all the names for which he possessed files. He looked at the index, then got up and went to the files stacked behind him. He picked up a file, flipped through it and returned it to its place. Then he took hold of another one, nodded and handed it to me.

I took the file and flipped through its pages. I read his name. I scanned the official notes and the security-service observations about his character. I could have jumped for joy. Faris Hassan began to haggle over the price. I had no wish to listen to Faris bargaining about a price that was no more than the cost of a pair
of trousers or a shirt. I asked him to pay the man so that I could get on with my work.

We went down two or three steps and walked through the street’s rubbish dump. We stepped on dead cats, an appalling stench filling our nostrils.

We got into the minivan and went straight to Kamal Medhat’s house in Al-Mansour.

Most of the material in the file consisted of reports or summaries of reports, some of which were general in nature while others were personal. Only one report really shocked me. Iraqi intelligence had known that he was one of those Iraqis who’d been expelled as an Iranian subject and that he’d gone to Damascus and married Nadia al-Amiry. It was on the record that he’d then arrived in Baghdad and worked with the National Symphony Orchestra. The most important aspect of the report was the security responses given in support of his arrest or interrogation. Some of the documents recommended keeping him under constant surveillance. One important report discussed his relationship with Widad and other private matters. There was also a report on his affair with Janet, for the reports weren’t limited to his political attitudes, which categorized him as a free liberal. The word ‘free’ meant that he had no political affiliations nor any connections with religious movements. Among all the reports was one written by Widad, which had been submitted to a security investigation. She’d recommended him highly and defended him staunchly.

The question is: Did Kamal Medhat know that the state was aware of his previous incarnation? I doubt it.

The artist’s house in Al-Mansour

His house in Al-Mansour stood a mere two hundred meters from the statue of Abu Jaafar al-Mansour, the second Abbasid Caliph. The house had a beautiful brick façade and high windows in the style of the seventies. When Faris and I entered, we went through a corridor that led us straight to the library that was packed with books. In front of the dining table was a teak cupboard, which was used for household utensils. On some of the shelves, however, he’d also placed more books, while there was a stack of novels on the floor. There was also a table near the chair in which he used to sit looking out of the window. I found two books on the table. The first was the memoirs of the French violinist Stéphane Grappelli and the second was a selection of poems by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, translated into English under the title
Tobacco Shop
. The book was open at the poem called
Tobacco Shop
and was filled with explanatory notes written in pencil by Kamal Medhat. It’s clear that he’d depended on more than one book in his commentary on the poem. I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time, but I took the book and the pencil with me when I left.

There were many newspapers in the bedroom. It was clear that he’d spent most of his time in the dining room. But the door leading to the sitting room at the back remained shut throughout the days of the war.

There was a photograph of a fifty-year-old Nadia al-Amiry, looking beautiful with her blonde hair in two plaits that she curved around her ears. She wore a dark blue blouse and had put a ball of
wool on the table. She was half-hidden behind the teapot. Kamal was standing close by with his plastic-rimmed glasses, his light beard and his sad eyes behind semi-dark lenses, smiling at her. Nadia al-Amiry herself looked straight ahead. Kamal Medhat was slightly stooped over the book he was absorbed in reading. With his grey hair and huge hands, he looked more like a worker than a musician.